Sunday, September 10, 2006

I’ll grant you, under normal circumstances I am not exactly a pillar of level-headed rationality. However, I manage to function and maintain a relatively stable existence (this being relative to my relatives.) However, every month I am blindsided by a sweeping storm of madness that, despite its recurrence for the past 17 years, perennially takes me by surprise. For the first time ever, this month I have been entirely alone – roommateless, boyfriendless, parental/familial companyless – to inflict upon myself the torturous insanity I usually reserve for my loved ones.

It starts with a desire to disinfect every inch of the house (which is different from cleaning the house). This seemingly benign impulse starts off productively enough. It is nine pm on Saturday – a totally normal time to begin cleaning the house. So I’m sweeping the stairs. I am sending clouds of dust and animal dander into the air with great flourish. At the bottom of the stairs I start experiencing that weird post-sweep satisfaction when you’ve got a really giant pile of gathered together crap to eliminate. But you can never REALLY get all of that pile into the dust pan. There is always a line of very fine dust left after the last swipe. Normally, I would throw a rug over it or something. But yesterday at nine pm I was a long distance from normal.

Out comes the vacuum cleaner. But even with that you can’t REALLY be sure that every last particle of dust has been eliminated. Thus, 10:15 pm finds me, a sponge, and warm soapy water all getting intimate with every surface in the house. And said intimacy follows no logical route. I walk from the kitchen to the living room and pounce at random. The finger print smudged light switch, door knobs, one floorboard but then not the next, then, mid-floor board, I remember the stove has a spot on it that had been bugging me earlier…all at great speed and with unnatural intensity.

At about quarter to eleven I decide I must know if my favorite jeans still fit like they used to. I must know right that very second. But I can’t just leave the soapy water sitting there. CAN’T have it both ways. And both things are (clearly) of earth shattering importance. War in Iraq, AIDS in Africa, Autism – you name it, it comes second, at this moment, to whether or not those jeans still fit and how clean I can get the house. I am standing in the center of a room having trouble deciding what to do first – get rid of the soapy water or try on the jeans. The stress of this decision making process frustrates me. Like the kind of frustration that makes me want to bite off my own fingers at the first knuckle and gnaw on them until my jaw breaks or I bleed to death, whatever comes first.

The jeans are a little snug. This begins the weep-fest that lasts until 4:27 on Sunday.

Okay, jeans are snug. So what do I do? I go to Walgreens for ice cream (a bit complicated but essentially I accepted the inevitability of my own pre-destined obesity and decided to sink into its clutches without further protest. Also there’s the chocolate thing, which is very real.)

But Walgreens does not have Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. I cannot allow the ingestion of 1200 calories in one sitting for anything less than Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. This is a catastrophe. Nightmarish. So I leave and decide to go home. On the way there I pass Cold Stone Creamery and think, “What are we if we aren’t willing to try new things?” But Cold Stone Creamery is PACKED and while waiting in line I revert back to my original decision that it’s BJ’s CFB or nothing.

I am standing on the corner of Highland and Baxter, without ice cream, still sniffling, meandering through an extremely insane and impossible to recreate thought process regarding ice cream, blue jeans, womanhood, etc. all of which morphs into a cold dagger shaped anger toward men/society/American Eagle Outfitters/planet earth. It is past eleven and the tail end of some festival has clotted the street to my left with drunken revelry. I am in no shape for human interaction and, had I any sense, would go buy my second or third choice ice cream flavor and go home to watch When Harry Met Sally. But no. I walk into the remains of the festival where stores are still open, their sidewalk sale racks poised for browsing.

It is a fabulous jacket. I have to have it. I will expire right here on the Bud Light cup littered sidewalk one block from home if I don’t have it and wouldn’t that be a tragedy. I’m there in the street wedged between clusters of drunk people trying on the jacket when some unsuspecting male person tells me that jacket looks great with those jeans. Very flattering. Etc.

I ask you to remind yourself of Linda Blair’s interactions with the priest. I think I turned to face him, but my head might have just wound backwards on its own, hard to say. I asked him in a sort of demonic hiss, “Don’t you have some fucking Nascar you should be watching or something?” He put his hands up in the “I don’t have any weapons” gesture. I literally shoved him out of my way and walked to the register to purchase the jacket (after all it looked good with my favorite jeans).

I end up back home without ice cream but with a great jacket, which provides some fleeting sense of satiety. Not three minutes later, hanging up my new jacket, I just start bawling. For absolutely zero reason. Instead of embracing a good cry I start doing the dumbest thing anyone can do during an irrational reasonless weep session which is FIND reasons to which the crying might be attributed. I am not sure if I can adequately explain this because I have since re-entered the world of moderately rational human beings but here goes. I don’t attribute the crying to actual reasons. Heck no. I don’t choose reasons that currently exist but reasons why, if those reasons applied, I WOULD cry. This means that in rapid succession horribly depressing POTENTIAL reasons to cry weave in and out of my little bloated brain. What if the dog got hit by a car. That would be terrible. I’d have to explain how I let it happen and the driver would feel badly and that would be bad too the driver feeling bad and what if I hit a dog well I don’t drive but what if I did and I killed a dog which would be worse Tizrah getting hit by a car or me hitting someone else’s dog oh that is terrible how could I even think that but I did I thought it I must be terrible and what if it wasn’t a dog what if like my sister got hit by car or who let’s see who would I pick if I had to pick somebody to get hit by a car who would I pick well that is even worse why am I even thinking about this I deserve to be crying that’s right I deserve it weep fatso weep devil woman.

Eventually I fall asleep and it is Sunday. There exists one reason to get out of bed. The Patriots are playing football today and there is no crying during the first football game of the season.

But I am in Kentucky. And no such game is playing on any channel. The remote is getting all wet because I’m crying all over it wondering “what could possibly be wrong what am I so UPSET about” still not really cognizant of the impetus for such insanity. I am flipping the channels, bravely coming to terms with the no Patriots game thing. There are a few films that a person in this state simply should not watch. Number one USED to be Philadelphia, then later Hotel Rwanda.

I couldn’t have stopped on TBS for cute little Melanie Griffith outsmarting Sigourney Weaver. Couldn’t watch Annette Benning fall in love with the president. Couldn’t even watch Harrison Ford prove what all of us knew already which is that every lawyer would benefit from a bullet to the head. Certainly not. I watch the one thing that could surpass Philadelphia and Hotel Rwanda combined. Spike Lee, levees, shattering indifference on the part of our beloved compassionately conservative administration….

So after watching Barbara Bush walk around and label American citizens “refugees” and profess that it was somehow fortuitous for such a disadvantaged population to be granted food and shelter I decide I ought to go for a nice long run but not before calling the white house and (still weeping, mind you) blubber unintelligibly long after some staffer in the 202 hung up.

After watching mothers mourn their drowned children another person might have been rendered unable to feel sorry for herself for, say, fifteen minutes. But when, not yet done with mile one, my right calf muscle cramps badly enough to stop my run midstride, the poor-kelly-meter’s needle is pushing eleven.

I get home at quarter past four, fifteen minutes past the hour Rose – the most evil cat on the planet – expects to be fed. I am now over my calf muscle and back to weeping about Katrina and this cat is meowing and whining and rubbing my leg, a thing she only does when she wants something. And I am thinking how Rose the cat princess assumes my world revolves around her and god forbid she wait fifteen minutes to have her dinner I mean she’s lucky to even BE fed for the love of all that’s holy she is so damned SELFISH I mean how ANNOYING is it to be in presence of something that believes the universe revolves not around the sun but around…

And that’s pretty much the minute I have the epiphany, stop crying, and feed the damn cat.

(The irony that I proceeded to post a three page single spaced blog about myself was noted and then subsequently ignored.)

Monday, September 04, 2006

I spent the last eight years running on the path that flanks Boston and Cambridge’s respective banks of the Charles River. As I gradually moved from apartment to apartment, from one side of the river to the other, my loop widened and my starting point shifted. Every place came with its own unique living situation, its livability dictated by neighborhood, the building’s degree of disrepair, and, above all, the other people inhabiting the space. In the tumultuous life of a renter, that run along the Charles, mile-marked by bridges from Science Museum and back, was a welcome constant in a world of variables.My first route started at the Boston University Bridge. It was a quick walk from the front door of a five bedroom Allston house with shag carpet whose residential time line was decipherable via the gum collection, dotting the floors in varying degrees of decay. Due to an impulsive decision backed by exactly zero hours of research, I ended up in the basement room with the weight lifting equipment belonging to my four Skinhead/from Jersey/Yankee fan roommates. As a neophyte athlete those “runs” were characterized by a lot of walking. I would breathlessly perch over the banks of the river, hands at my knees. It was impossible to know that I would later be able to tell what season and time of day it is by the color of the water. By the time my internet-discovered roommates blew up and chained to the living room wall an inflatable blonde, I had mastered the BU-Science Museum-BU four and a half mile course and secured an apartment in another part of town.The Lakeside Apartment complex provided shelter in another basement, but this time with a nice young man. Living in a small carpeted carbon copy of its neighbors we sank into a happy sunless permanent dusk, spending long mornings and evenings dream talking, thinking we might get married. So I ran less, taking the train downtown in my shorts and running the seven and a half back to my nice young man in a basement.We moved closer to town, taking a place with bright gleaming surfaces and French doors. Closest to the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, whose span of the Charles offers two views. One of the clustered bump and gold dome that is Beacon Hill and, alternately, the river’s winding retreat toward Watertown and less polluted, tree lined shores dotted once with the neon splotch of Fenway and Kenmore Square. My runs got long again, always beginning or ending with the trip over Mass Ave, where I’d stop, stretch, and stare out over the city I was coming to know so well. Despite the sunlight in that new apartment, things between my nice young man and I began to fall apart. I started spending sunsets on the bridge, timing my runs so I could watch the sky go pink and attribute my post-run tears to how just incredibly beautiful that sky could be. For months I returned to a dark apartment, surface-gleam reduced to the gray-blue of moonglow or flickering blue of tv light.After five years of running and three years of that nice young man, I paired up with a friend of mine, signing a lease for a closet-sized apartment some realtor had the gall to list as a two bedroom. In Beacon Hill, prestige trumps size. Though I cursed the apartment every time I had to shimmy by my bed to get to the “desk” (slab of wood), the only other piece of furniture wedged into my “room,” on the night I accidentally ashed my cigarette onto a man in a very nice suit who, turning around, revealed the long regal face of John Kerry I had to hand it to my Beacon Hill-enthusiast of a roommate, it was a cool place to be.The best thing about the place was its proximity to the river and my runs picked up in frequency. It was following one such run that I found my door chained from the inside but no answer from my roommate, supine on the couch. An avid drinker, this scenario was not unfamiliar - her substantial belly rolling to one side, her mouth hanging open, unresponsive to all manner of noises, calls, things thrown. It wasn’t until I had assailed her motionless figure with balled up socks, one shoe, and a tank top that I simultaneously noticed the brimming mouthful of vomit and the overturned clear amber bottle whose shape and color is singular to prescription drugs.Breaking into one’s own apartment is a difficult experience, because of the damage inflicted upon one’s own space as well as the realization that a human being no stronger than oneself is capable of overriding whatever security measures are in place. That said, shouldering my way through the chain lock in the name of emergency was not without a certain twinge of self satisfaction. Also, at this point relations in the closet “two bedroom” had degenerated into a venerable battleground situation. I know what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t just that she was a chain smoking Yankee fan Republican with no concept of personal space. Nobody ever wants to admit having inhumane thought processes, but I will let you in on the fact that I saved her life based on the sole reason that if she died I would never get back the money I had loaned her.If the apartment felt small with the suicidal non payer back of large loans, it felt microscopic when, during her tenure at McLean, her mother invaded our prestigious Beacon Hill address. With her daughter strapped to the finest psych ward bed money can buy, I should have excused her constant reminders of how I ought to maintain an orderly and germ free apartment. Her stay ended abruptly with a curt note regarding her relocation to the Holiday Inn across Cambridge Street approximately two yards northeast. It is no coincidence that during this time I ran three 10Ks, two half marathons, and every 5K jog around town I could find.Three months later, she came in like she always came in – loudly, and dangling a Marlboro from her bottom lip, looking only slightly paler than normal. I hadn’t taken out the trash in weeks. In a third floor apartment, late August, the evidence of such a lapse is immediately obvious. She took her cigarette from her lip and pointed its red end to the garbage bags piled in our “kitchen,” and said, “All of my personalities are pissed at you.”Whatever stage of recovery she was at, it didn’t mesh with a life in the city, and she moved soon after to what the doctors had called Mclean – “someplace quiet.” Thus began a new roommate and apartment search, Beacon Hill’s prestige no longer trumping its size or its price.Enter Brookline. Between Boston University and Boston College, a quiet predominantly Jewish neighborhood with great schools and no overnight parking. Enter also a predominantly Jewish high school friend who had no known suicidal leanings. Having only the furniture that would fit into the prestigiously-located-but-overwrought-with-drama apartment, this spacious two bedroom looked, all 365 days of our tenure, like we were waiting for the Jordan’s delivery truck. Still, we settled into happy roommatedom, free from argument, suicide attempts, and borrowed-money.At this point, I began seeing other bodies of water. I still ran along the Charles regularly, but I also took occasional jogs around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Populated by almost entirely Boston College runners, the track surrounding the reservoir provided constant reminder of just how unremarkable an athlete I was. Endlessly I heard footfalls approach, momentarily run alongside, and then pass me, little pairs of BC emblazoned shorts growing smaller and smaller in my line of sight.Ending my term as a Boston renter on a good note, I ventured to the other side of the river where the People’s Republic of Cambridge, in all its Harvard-harboring glory, welcomed me into a colorful place with a balcony. After seven years of running the same direction around the Charles, I suddenly switched. For the first time, I noticed that the Citgo sign is missing chunks of its display on its backside.The colorful apartment (accent walls in shades including but not limited to “Holly Red” and “Fire Glow Orange”) came with a roommate found on that endless flea market in cyberspace, Craigslist, where you can find anything from a date that essentially guarantees rough sex to a vintage pair of roller skates. Or you could find someone who’s inclined to combine the two. She was a woman so taut one constantly flinched in her presence, her face in my memory an exaggerated cartoonish representation of a rubber band stretched back from the thumb of a particularly mischievous ten year old boy. When I came home to her loudly engaging in premarital relations with my ex boyfriend my initial reaction was to go for humor. Probably in an emotional version of the sort of shock that allows mangled persons to leave scenes of horrific car accidents, I put track number four of my Disney Classics Volume One CD (of which I am reluctantly right here and now admitting possession) on repeat and blasted Elton John’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight sixteen times before relenting and allowing the album to continue on to Let’s Go Fly a Kite. He was out the door somewhere between the love theme from Cinderella and a Fantasia instrumental. She was out of the apartment three months later.This marked the period where my running career was supplemented by boxing lessons. I jogged up my stairs, throwing post-run punches from a hooded sweatshirt, darting and weaving, humming a certain Bill Conti number way off-key. My teary-eyed stretching routine made regular comebacks. I posted a roommate-wanted ad on Craigslist that included the line “must not smoke, have pets, or sleep with anyone I’ve ever dated. Ever.”Eventually I chose one of the many women who responded with vows to never sleep with anyone I even knew as long as I would let them in my heat and hot water included apartment. As far as I know, she is still there, putting things where she likes them, cleaning or not cleaning based on her own whim.I have since left the Northeast altogether, and am taking the plunge into roommatelessness. For a person who still feels like she’s trying on someone else’s clothes when donning a suit, the prospect of living alone feels distinctly, foreignly adult. When I come home there is absolutely zero chance (well, not zero, but it would be extremely unlikely) that someone will have chained a blowup doll to my wall, or tried to off themselves on my couch, or be a person I thought I might marry, or be engaging in premarital relations with anyone I ever thought I might marry. But no one will be there to ask how many miles I did that day, either.With my car filled to illegal levels due to the obstruction of my rear window, I postponed my drive a thousand miles from Boston by an hour to go for one more run along the Charles. It was early in the day and summer but I didn’t have to stop on the bridge and look down to know that the water looked like old coffee. I was thinking that maybe the Ohio River will look like coffee too. Or pewter, like the pre-dawn Charles. Or oil, like the clear-night-deep-into-winter Charles. Or maybe it will look, refreshingly, like water.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

All day every day I put things in alphabetical order. Go ahead test me. Kelly what’s between J and M? KL. Bam. No pausing. Right there back with it. I know the alphabet like…well like the alphabet. Which I know even better than the back of my hand. The back of my hand is something I’m not all that familiar with. How many freckles are on my left hand? No clue. How many letters in the alphabet? 26.

I’m rambling. The point is I am employed but still looking. I am casually dating this job with the option for seeing other jobs (which always means you are hoping to meet a better job I mean seriously.)

A man named Rod called me four days ago, responding to a resume I had forgotten I emailed to basically every place in Louisville whose web address ended in dot org. So Rod of an unknown dot org says he’s looking for a sort of creative director type person to help organize this uber-progressive school he runs. He wants someone to organize trips into the woods where kids learn to write poetry/gut fish/be at one with nature/etc. Rod wants to know if I am qualified to maybe do this and teach a few writing/lit classes to inner city homeless kids. He also wants me to know that my resume is pretty much his favorite resume ever and he’ll do some number crunching and figure out a way to make the salary competitive with what I put as my salary requirement on some phantom email I forgot I sent. Rod is basically sent from heaven is what Rod is.

But then it turns out Rod really IS sent from Heaven. Capitalized Heaven.

Rod says, “And Kelly before I go ahead and get really excited about this, I just want to make sure that you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your savior.”

Rod says this offhand like he’s asking if I know that service necessitates the wearing of shirts and shoes. Like embarrassed to even be asking a question whose answer is so obviously yes.

And I have this weird moment. Could I be Sister Mary Iambic Pentameter? This moment slowed down Zach Morris style, like he had just snapped his fingers and frozen time so I could discuss with the audience whether or not I wanted to tell Mr. Belding that I was an atheist/aspiring Jew/potential antichrist…

Two years ago a friend of mine embattled the both of us in an argument the crux of which was this: if we are both characters on Seinfeld, who is Elaine? This seems irrelevant and nonsequitorish but it isn’t. You see, after several arguments, it was decided that she was Elaine and I was GEORGE. And up until Rod’s phone call I had been able to tell myself that this comparison wasn’t in any way based on my deportment but rather alluded to my adorable ability to, um, “aim above morality.”

But could I, as George certainly would have, pretend to be a devout Christian in order to get a job? Could I sit there and tell Rod Mister teach poetry in the woods for money that when in doubt about a certain action I stop and wonder what course of action Jesus would take and that if I forget there’s a little plastic bracelet on my wrist to remind me? Could I deny that the only time I say the father, son, and holy ghost is when I’m singing along with Don Mclean? Could I stomach creationism in science class? I could not. Which delivered the cold hard truth about my Costanzaness lying not in my morals but my BMI. Damn.

So I said to Rod, "And the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write them." -Isaiah 10:18-20

Saturday, September 02, 2006

In originally choosing the blog name I was leaning more toward the “lost in thought” end of bemused’s nuanced definition spectrum. Plus there was the inexplicable (but powerful) draw toward something cutesy and alliterative. But here I am faced with my first long weekend as a nine-to-fiver and I’m feeling at best preoccupied. And am I preoccupied with some worthy task, drawn from my computer by, say, a leading role in some community theater production of Equus or polishing old people’s floors for charity? No. I’m not even up to any good mischief. I spent three hours yesterday watching a film in which the major plot points involved trying unsuccessfully to get a middle aged man laid for the first time and then an entire hour literally doing nothing. Literally. I sat in a chair. I sat in the same chair with a book by my side and a dog insisting in various ways that I pay her attention on the other and I kept my hands in my lap and looked at a not-on television and simply inhaled and exhaled as needed.

I think this might directly relate to the fact that for the past month I have shaken my pride out of a cardboard box and into a bowl every morning, poured milk on it, and eaten it for breakfast.

But Kelly, you ask, you have been a cocktail waitress for the past seven years – how could you possibly feel any worse?

I feel like Julia Roberts when she has to deal with the condescending well-married bitches at the polo game. If I had a tray in my hand and gum in my mouth and very little was left to the imagination in terms of my outfit I would have a much easier time, somehow, putting things in alphabetical order over and over and over and over again. And don’t forget affixing labels in the upper right hand corner. I am fucking awesome at affixing labels. I bend the non-adhesive backing once and that sucker is poised and ready to be removed and affixed. No fumbling. No dicking around with plucking and scratching and wishing for longer nails.

And yes, I just compared myself to a hooker protagonist. Let’s get past that and recognize that I am having a little trouble adjusting. I get up when I used to come home. I am glad that it’s a three day weekend, rather than dreading the elongation of the two-day nightmare that exhausts and depresses every food-service industry minion everywhere. I do not make any more or less money based on the following factors: how much cleavage I am showing, how many times I force myself to smile, how many different variations of an entrée order I can accurately remember… Nobody (openly) blows lines in the bathroom.

It’s weird.

But here’s the thing. In the restaurant industry pretty much everyone is a peon. We all suffer the same indignities day in and day out. We all curse the guests aware of but willing to ignore the fact that without them we don’t make any money. Nobody really wants to be there and it isn’t a secret. Everyone has something else going on.

Two offices down from mine a woman I have chosen to nickname “Babette” sits behind a desk and thinks of ways to make me want to think of ways to kill her. I’m sure of it. Granted, if I had no office nemesis my day would be entirely devoid of any and all excitement. Every Seinfeld needs his Newman. And Newman Babette is. She is the type of woman who, in her late forties, looks like she has just stopped being the hottest woman in the room a few years ago and is not dealing with it very well. She is the Dean’s secretary.

The first time I encountered Babette I was delivering several pieces of mail addressed to the dean but accidentally delivered to our office. Babette’s desk is behind a tall counter like structure so that she is set back from the entrance in a little den of bitchiness, on a lower level but since the counter is so high anyone my height is dwarfed by the thing, giving her the opportunity to arch her little head up as if she is trying to see the little insignificant person standing behind the counter. I swear she designed this set up herself.

Babette asks how she can help me in such a way that reveals a total and complete desire to help no one especially not me.

I’m in mid answer when she asks if I am new.

I say yes, I am new, I am working in the admissions office.

She inquires, tooootally innocently, as to where they have me since there aren’t any more offices open in the admissions office.

I explain that I am a floater. No office. Totally comfortable with that.

Babette one. Kelly zero.

Enter the dean. A jokester type who likes to pat people on the back, throw out a one-liner, and disappear. I have never seen him in the same spot for more than one sentence.

He says, “Hey Harvard, taking over the place yet?”

Fair to say this ties Babette and I.

She would like to know my title. I manage to tell Babette that I am a temp (the bus boy of officeland).

Babette says “oh” in such a self satisfied snitty little prissy ass bitch way that I consider vaulting the too-high counter and going cocktail waitress on her ass.

Since then Babette has visited our office three times. Each time she looks over my head and asks everyone, “Oh, do you have a new person? And what does she do?” And every time my officemates make up some new collection of words that do not include the word “temp” and every time Babette responds with, “Oh, you’re a temp? Well welcome.”

I tire of Babette’s welcomes. I really do.

Last week she brought in her mother-in-law who had one of those hats with the feathers splayed in an upward swoop like a handful of cards fanned out. The whole thing bright red. The woman was clearly batshit. She introduced her batshit mother-in-law to everyone in the office with one exception and then, after great pause, said, “Oh, I’m sorry, have we met?”

So far my only form of revenge has been to sing the chorus of a certain applicable ELO song whenever I pass her door on the way to the bathroom.

This office hierarchy bullshit is too much for me. Babette sits behind a structurally demeaning configuration of faux-mahogany and answers phones and makes coffee every morning just like I do. We should be bound by our misery, not in competition for titles and doors and windows and whatever it is she’s after. But we have no common enemy. We must keep it a secret that our jobs aren’t, at every moment, the very thing we had hoped since girlhood to be doing. As a waitress I had to kiss ass for a self-contained period. Everything was immediate. Someone I hate comes in, stays for an hour, and I can immediately start cursing him once the revolving door sends him back into the fuckhead factory from whence he came. Officeland moves much more slowly. In order to move from one office (or no office) to the next you must tolerate fuckhead after fuckhead for periods of time absolutely inconceivable to your average cocktail waitress.